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The Great Adventure 2017 Part Eleven

Okay, we are heading into our last week and I should finish the narrative in no time!  We left off as we were riding the train to Oxford, which was where we picked up our next car.  Our B&B was in Stow-on-the-Wold, which should have been a fairly quick and easy drive.  Unfortunately, our GPS again conspired against us and by the time we figured out we were indeed going in the wrong direction, we had made our drive into a considerably longer one than it needed to be.  I hesitate to say that we wasted time, since seeing any place in England was interesting, but we did have to do some backtracking to get where we needed to be. We spent two nights in a very quaint building that was built in 1640.  The narrow circular staircase and slant to the floors bore out this fact. Imagine carrying two suitcases up these stairs! We had heard good things about the Cotswolds and were looking forward to seeing some part of the area.  Our first impression was that they are indeed popular with

The Great Adventure 2017 Part Ten

Our last day in Keswick was also cold and rainy, but we wanted to see an ancient stone circle ala Stonehenge called Castlerigg.  It wasn't far from town, so we got directions and headed out.  Of course it's in the middle of nowhere, unmarked, down a little mud road but we eventually arrived.  The information said that Castlerigg Stone Circle was built around 4500 years ago in the Neolithic period.  As with Stonehenge, no one really knows the reason it was put here. Castlerigg is about 97.5 feet in diameter and formerly consisted of 42 stones, 38 of which remain.  The stones vary in height from 3.5 feet to 7.5 feet. The site is very picturesque and there are views for miles across the plains.  This also means that the wind whips through, as it was on the day we visited.  We took a quick walk around, a couple of photos, and ran back to the car. We had the rest of the day, so visited the Derwent Pencil Museum, home of the world's first pencil.  This was an interestin

The Great Adventure 2017 Part Nine

This is getting ridiculous; we've been back for two months and my journal is only half finished.  Since I'm doing this mostly so I can have a record of where we went and what we did, I'm going to complete it.  There will probably be fewer words and more photos as I go along, but at least it will be done.  As always, click on the photo to make it larger. I left us at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, County Durham.  We still had a car for this portion of the journey so we left there and headed for the lake district and Keswick (pronounced Kezick).  This was a day of rainbows, as we left Barnard Castle in a light rain shower. The roads weren't too busy, which was always a plus for us since when we drove we were both on high alert all the time.  No knitting in the car for me! Our first stop was at High Force waterfall, a place Pat had researched at home and we had decided to see.  On its descent to the North Sea, the River Tees encounters a large outcrop of volc